jotix100 A group of bored teenagers coming from rich families in Los Angeles discover the style most black inner city kids practice. Some of them, especially the young men, even go as far as sporting the clothing worn by the people they are imitating. Two girls, Allison and Emily, on the other hand, are more daring without a need for adopting the fashions when the hang out. Sam and Eric, who are the leaders of the school gang, decide to explore East Los Angeles, a neighborhood in which the Hispanics are a majority. The teenagers, accompanied by Allison and Emily, decide to buy drugs from a street gang called '16'. The meeting ends up badly, as the Mexicans cheat the suburban kids. Allison, who earlier has spoken about how bored she really is, finds the excitement she yearns to have in her sheltered life.All these aimless youths have one thing in common, they come from dysfunctional families with money, where a parent figure is always absent. Allison invites more trouble when she decides to explore that world, totally dominated by Hector. Allison, having sold the idea of joining the gang to Emily, decide to go to Hector's turf. The thrill of entering that territory will end badly, as Emily, the weakest of the duo, suffers a shock of her life. In the end, there will be a confrontation heard, but not seen that serves as a sobering reminder the two worlds could not blend easily.Barbara Kopple, the award winning documentary director, tried her hand with this film that juxtaposes two cultures that are as far as night and day. The rich life in Pacific Palisades will never accept the less privileged people of East Los Angeles. The film is a sort of parable in how the bored teens of the richer suburbs want to experience the real world they only love to imitate. Ms. Kopple uses a device she is quite familiar with, the young man that is seen interviewing his peers in search of answers which are never too clear.Anne Hathaway surprises with her daring performance. Usually seen in good girl roles, her Allison is quite a departure for her. She showed courage in accepting a role that was totally the opposite of what we knew of her screen persona. Freddy Rodriguez is also good as Hector, the boy that prefers to stay within his own territory. Bijou Phillips plays Emily. Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Matt O'Leary do a good job of imitating the black kids they would like to impersonate. Laura San Giacomo and Michael Biehn are seen briefly as Allison's parents.

me-ga-sa It was more like a parody than a serious movie, the acting was really bad. Everything was hardly believable. What the hell Anne Hathaway was doing in this??? She didn't fit in, it was the most inappropriate role for her. How could she even agree to this? Joseph Gordon-Levitt was the most funny one. I couldn't understand what was he doing. Mike Vogel looked stupid. Nothing seemed serious. How can so many actors play so bad in one movie? Only the latinos were seeming believable. That was just plain ridiculous. I just wish the camera boy was Aaron Ashmore, he would make a movie worth some more points. And what was that all about? Apart from the horrible acting the movie has nothing interesting in it's plot. Why did they make it at all?? I am shocked how a movie with so many famous actors can be so crappy. How did they make them all act so bad?? Seriously??

tchockythegreat Despite the fact that this movie is like the umpteenth variation of Rebel Without A Cause, anybody who has gone to a high school in an affluent area in the last decade and seen the amount of pampered young 'wiggers' there are knows that the premise of this flick is relevant to today's youth and is worth exploring. Unfortunately, the movie fails to deliver on this promising premise and only succeeds in wasting a fine performance from Anne Hathaway.The movie WANTS to make a powerful statement about spoiled, naive, pseudo-disillusioned youths searching for identity in the superficial only to receive a colossal reality check when they realize the life they've been imitating isn't as glamorous as they had thought. Unfortunately, this noble message is lost in a weak script and characters that are either one-dimensional, unbelievable or both. Although one must consider the fact that the screenplay was for the most part written by a 16-year-old girl before judging it, it is disappointing that an Academy Award-winning co-writer with some experience with this genre of film (Stephen Gaghan) could not give the screenplay and characters a more authentic feel.Even if it was the screenwriter's intention to make the script's dialogue horrible for the sake of legitimizing just how inane the gang of rich white teens are acting, the horrid screen writing comes off so cartoonish that the viewer will have an extremely difficult time accepting the dialogue, and consequently the behavior, of these characters as being legitimate. As a result, the gang of rich white wannabe thugs come off, for the most part, as being overwrought caricatures saddled with some of the most laughably horrible dialogue ever heard in a motion picture. As for the gang of cholo thugs in the movie, they come off as being far too nice and too stereotypical to Latinos, and thus seem only marginally less cartoony that the gang of rich white kids.The movie's lone saving grace is Anne Hathaway. Playing a role that shares some parallels with and could be considered a natural extension of her smart-girl-with-a-rebellious-streak Meghan Green character from the short-lived TV series Get Real, hers was the only character in the movie that had any sort of depth and believability. The script, despite its many shortcomings, succeeds in making it clear just how self-aware, intelligent, and capable of good Hathaway's character is, in spite of her actions as a member of the gang of rich white teens, giving the film its lone three-dimensional character. Because of Hathaway's talent as an actress, as well as her successful exploitation of the public's predominant perception of her as a wholesome girl next door for this film, it is easy for the audience to believe that Hathaway's character is the rebel-without-a-clue fish out of water that the script is trying to portray her as. Hathaway's acting is superb, head and shoulders above anyone else in the film, which adds to her character's legitimacy. However, the people who see this movie will likely be too busy snickering at the inane lines of dialogue she's repeatedly forced to drop or, more likely, be gaping at their TV thinking "O...M...G! The chick from The Princess Diaries is actually TOPLESS!" to notice her solid performance.Which leads to a discussion of arguably the biggest reason most people even know this film exists. Hathaway has claimed in interviews that she only does nudity in films if she deems it necessary to the story. While a case can be made that most of the nudity in the film was appropriate when considering the context of the scenes in which it was featured, I find myself questioning just how "necessary" it is, for example, to show Hathaway's character popping her top while making out with her boyfriend (or for that matter, to see Bijou Phillips' character in the film topless while taking a bubble bath). That's not to say this movie should be mistaken for a late-night film on Skinemax; it most certainly isn't. But Hathaway is topless just enough in this film to make this obvious attempt to expand her acting repertoire beyond the roles in family films she had previously been limited to seem heavy-handed and maybe even a little desperate. Anne, take it from me, you're a wonderful actress. That alone will do more to land you mature roles than taking off your top for sex scenes in a poorly-scripted indie movie ever will.When all is said and done, the amount of nudity in this movie only made it worse; when you factor the amount of it in along with in how disappointing the movie is, it only adds evidence to the argument that the only reason this movie exists was for Hathaway to prove to us just how far she was willing to go to avoid being typecast as Princess Mia Thermopolis for the rest of her acting career...which is a shame, considering her legitimately solid acting job in this movie.Rent "Kids" or "Thirteen" instead; both films are about topics similar to this movie and both are far better.

zetes This movie was thrown out on DVD in 2005 without any real theatrical release. It's well pedigreed for such treatment, directed by famed documentarian Barbara Kopple (Harlan County USA), written by late phenom Jessica Kaplan, "fixed" by famed screenwriter Stephen Gaghan (Traffic) and starring Anne Hathaway in her first serious role. The film is far from perfect, but it isn't nearly as bad as people have said. It's main problem is that it is undoubtedly exploitative. Hathaway and co-star Bijou Philips both get naked, the kind of naked that leaves the viewer feeling sleazy. The film is about a group of teenagers from upscale Los Angeles who like to play gangsta, pretending they're black or Latino. When Hathaway's boyfriend is threatened by a Latino drug dealer (Freddy Rodriguez of Planet Terror), she is attracted to the more authentic gangsta scene. She becomes involved with Rodriguez, which leads to the titular havoc. While many of the characters are one-dimensional and uninteresting, Hathaway's is well written, and she turns in the best performance of her career up to that point. She's nearly as intriguing here as she would later be in Rachel Getting Married. Also appearing is my favorite young actor of today, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, but he has a pretty weak role, so it's not worth watching just for him.